3-D Printing Goes Prehistoric With a Kickstarted Dinosaur

Tyler Keillor's 2009 sculpted Dryptosaurus head. Photo: Jess Smith

Paleoartist Tyler Keillor has long specialized in sculpting realistic clay dinosaur heads for museums and universities, but for his next project — an exacting replica of a full Dryptosaurs built entirely as a 3-D digital object — Kiellor needed a little help from the crowd. He set up a modest Kickstarter campaign to help buy the tools needed to craft his dinosaur digitally, offering various 12-inch dinosaur models he’s designed as rewards. The $6,000 goal being met on Monday (and since doubled), Keillor is now setting up to start building a virtual model of this T-Rex cousin.

It’s Keillor’s first shot at digital art. He’ll use the professional 3-D sculpting program ZBrush to craft his model, then work with the 2-D/3-D production house Acme Designs, Inc to print out the initial small-scale version for his backers. (An aside: Only the first will be 3-D printed; to save on cost, Keillor will use it to make a mold and cast exact replicas for his backers — evidence of injection molding’s continued advantage over 3-D printing as an efficient means of mass production.)

But it’s not just 12-inch figurines Keillor is after, nor the life-size heads (including Dryptosaurus) he’s created before. It’s a virtual workshop of unlimited size.

“What digital will allow me to do is to digitally sculpt an entire body of a dinosaur,” he says. “And it could be a huge dinosaur, it could be a hundred-foot-long creature, and I can create that within digital space.”

The life-size Dryptosaurus that he’ll make with the additional Kickstarter money, though, will be around 30 feet long, pieced together from CNC routed blocks, the seams sealed and the body painted by Keillor. It’ll even have a custom made skin to show the dinosaur’s distinct fuzzy feathered exterior.

But first, he has to make sure his design works.

“After I do the miniature printed version, I’ll do some full-size test sections, like portions of body, to see what the detail looks like,” he says. “From there I can go back and forth between tweaking the digital model and doing more of the real-world output tests to see what looks good.”

Dryptosaurus isn’t a well-known dinosaur, partly because there are not a lot of fossils of it, and no complete or partially complete skeletons.

“It allows a little bit of room for interpretation, but because we know the family of dinosaurs it belongs to — it’s related to the Tyrannosaurs — you’ve got a pretty good idea of it’s body form, it’s proportions, that kind of thing,” he says. “But there’s still this opportunity, artistically, to make it unique.”